English is an awful disease left behind by the British,” said Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu at a Hindi Divas event last fortnight. He didn’t leave it at that. Or we could have dismissed it as just another thoughtless metaphor littering Swachh Bharat. He added: We must rid ourselves of it and replace it with Hindi, “the only language of the sociopolitical and linguistic unity of India”.

Idon’t get it. How can Hindi be the only language that unites India when we have so many languages far older, far richer than Hindi, including English which (for millions of us) is as much an Indian language? These languages have as much reach if you took the actual numbers for Hindi and broke it down to the many dialects clubbed together as Hindi to give it greater political heft.

Take Bengali. It’s my mother’s tongue, the language of the city I grew up in, which gave India three of its five Nobel Prize winners. (The rest are PIOs.) Bengali is India’s second most spoken language and the world’s sixth. Or take Marathi, the language of the city I live in. It’s third.

There are people who would gladly argue that both Bengali and Marathi have far greater literary stature and would have easily surpassed Hindi had they been given the same incentives over 70 years.

BJP and Congress will have to recast the terms of engagement with Dalits and re-establish bona fides with their own Dalit leaders before reaching out to allies

Hindi has not had the privilege of linguistic primacy alone. Politicians of the Hindi heartland have had the privilege of setting the agenda for India over seven decades—and continue to have the largest say in what India’s future ought to be. After Bengali and Marathi, come Telugu and Tamil. Gujarati comes in sixth to replace a mellifluous Urdu, deliberately neglected—and we all know why. Our languages reflect the inequity of our politics. The rest of India has been forced to give way to the dominance of the Hindi heartland. But what is offensive is the belief (voiced by the Vice President) that Hindi was the language of our freedom struggle. Not true at all. The three great songs of the struggle were not in Hindi. Two were in Bengali; one in Urdu.

The first, Jana gana mana by Tagore, was written as a Brahmo hymn. It went on to become our national anthem in recognition of its role in the freedom struggle. It was first sung in the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1911. It was Tagore who had also sung Vande Mataramin the 1896 session of the Congress. It was he who set it to music.

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The song was written by Bankim Chandra in 1876 and became part of his novel, Anandamath. Pandit DV Paluskar, a Maharashtrian, made it popular by his public recitals across India. It’s our national song today. (Curiously, Bangladesh’s national anthem is a song by Tagore as well. And he scored the music for Sri Lanka’s national anthem.) The third song, Saare jahan se achha, was a poem by Iqbal, first published in 1904. He recited it the following year at Government College, Lahore, and it instantly became an anthem of opposition to British rule. The Mahatma sang it over a hundred times in Yerawada Jail.

The current popular version was composed by Pandit Ravi Shankar, a Bengali. Lata Mangeshkar, a Maharashtrian, sang another popular version of it.

Now, pray, tell me: Where does Hindi come into all this?

If you think we Bengalis only write songs, think again. We also gave India— along with many other non-Hindi speaking states—the great freedom fighters. Subhash Chandra Bose, Sri Aurobindo, Khudiram Bose, martyred at 18, Binoy Basu, Badal Gupta and Dinesh Gupta (famous as Binoy-Badal-Dinesh), Surya Sen, or Masterda as he was better known. There was Matangini Hazra, Bina Das, Sarojini Naidu.

The first reformist movements came from Bengal, too. Brahmo Samaj and Ramakrishna Mission began there. So did the Bengal Renaissance led by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. Reformists like Raja Rammohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda and his guru Ramakrishna Paramhansa, authors like Bankim Chandra and Rabindranath, who founded Shantiniketan and spurned a knighthood, poets like Michael Madhusudhan Dutt and Henry Derozio, scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, Kazi Nazrul Islam. The list is endless. But they are ignored in the hurry to promote heartland, Hindi-speaking heroes.

Now let’s talk of the disease itself. Over 125 million Indians proudly speak English here, the world’s second largest English-speaking population. The numbers could quadruple in the next decade, despite all efforts to undermine it. It’s the language of higher education; the language of research, commerce, progress; the language of creativity, and—as the Dalits say—the language of liberation. If anyone is asked to list the 10 greatest living writers of the English language, you are likely to find at least four Indians there. Instead of being proud of that, we want to undermine them.

Iread today about the India launch of Venki Ramakrishnan’s book, The Gene Machine. Professor Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize for his path-breaking work in molecular biology, decoding the ribosome. His discoveries are seriously impacting the future of the human race. He was born in an ancient temple town of Tamil Nadu and has spent all his working life in Western labs. He resides in Cambridge, writes and researches in English.

There are many more. Bombay-born Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s great novelists. In English, yes sir. Sir Vidia Naipaul was born in Chaguanas in Trinidad to a family of indentured labourers from eastern India and he ended up with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yes, he wrote in English. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a hugely respected cancer surgeon who won the Pulitzer for writing an incredibly good book on cancer. So did Jhumpa Lahiri for her fiction. In English again. Amartya Sen’s classic on how famines are man-made won him the Nobel Prize for Economics. He, too, writes in English.

Every region has its heroes. They are perhaps not as pampered as the statesponsored Hindiwallahs are. But their literature, their culture is just as important.

Those who have learnt English have excelled. No, they are not diseased, Mr Vice President. Tomorrow’s India belongs to them. They are taking India to the world.

Dalit leader Chandra Bhan Prasad and his followers mark October 25 as English Day. It is Macaulay’s birthday. They have built a temple to English, the Dalit goddess.

They claim Ambedkar wouldn’t have been Ambedkar but for his English. It liberated him from his background. That is why the Dalits see English as their greatest ally against Hindi imperialism and all the politics associated with it.

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